Google appears to be making good on a two-year-old promise to demote the search rankings of websites that receive more than their fair share of valid takedown notices.

“We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites," senior copyright counsel Katherine Oyama explained on Google's blog on Friday. "This update will roll out globally starting next week.”

Next week as in now.

Google agreed to this back in August 2012 following extensive lobbying from both the music and film industries, with Google Search seen as the inevitable portal to mass copyright infringement.

Wrapped up as part of its catchily titled How Google Fights Piracy initiative, the big G's new clampdown would affect leading file-sharing offenders such as Rapidgator.net, FilesTube.com and Dilandau.eu, which have all received at least 11 million individual takedown requests.

Of those doing the requesting, the BPI – or the British Recorded Music Industry to its mum – is still gunning for the title, topping the takedowners-in-chief currently with some 104,519,143 URLs reported. Degban, the RIAA and MarkMonitor AntiPiracy fill out the Champions League spaces. [Google via Music Ally]